A Kiss Before the Apocalypse Read Online Free

“Maybe it’s a miracle or something.”
    “Or something,” Remy repeated as he turned and walked from the motel room, leaving his friend to make sense of it all.
    Though Remy looked and acted like a human being and chose to live like one, he was nothing of the kind. On occasion, his body functioned on another level entirely. He could feel things, sense things, that others couldn’t. And right now there was something in the air that no one else could feel, something unnatural.
    As he walked across the parking lot, he glanced at his watch and swore beneath his breath.
    Late again.
    Remy got into his car, knowing that what had begun in room 35 of the Sunbeam Motor Lodge was far from over, and that two hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses wasn’t going to come close to compensating him for what he feared was waiting on the horizon.

CHAPTER TWO
    R emy stopped his car as a group of Northeastern University students crossed Huntington Avenue on their way to the dorms from afternoon classes. Impatiently, he glanced at his watch, angry with himself for being even later than usual. One last student cut across at a run to catch up with the gaggle, and Remy continued on toward South Huntington.
    Well, at least something’s going right, he thought, as he caught sight of a car pulling away from a space directly across the street from the Cresthaven Nursing Center. Remy performed an amazing feat of parallel parking, locked up his vehicle, and jogged across the street through a break in the dinnertime traffic.
    He pulled open the nursing home’s front door, and took a moment to compose himself as he was bombarded with a sensory overload the equivalent of storming the beach at Normandy. Smell, sound, emotion, taste; they all washed over him, pounding him, as they did every time he visited. The first time, he was nearly driven to his knees by the onslaught, but he quickly learned that a few deep breaths would help him to center, making the experience bearable.
    “You are in some deep doo-doo, my friend,” called out a large black woman dressed in a light blue smock and white slacks. She walked around the reception desk, waving some papers at him. “That poor woman’s been waiting for you over an hour. I told her you were caught in traffic, but I don’t think she’s buying it.”
    Remy smiled as the woman playfully tapped him on the shoulder with the forms.
    “I think she’s catchin’ on to us,” she said conspiratorially, looking Remy up and down as she moved on through the lobby.
    He waved to the receptionist, then stepped up behind the nurse. “No one must know of us, my Nubian goddess,” he whispered in her ear.
    The woman began to laugh, bending over and slapping her leg with the paperwork. “You are a crazy white boy, you know that?”
    “Joan, you wouldn’t have me any other way.” Remy smiled. He paused for a minute, enjoying the sound of laughter in a place where the atmosphere could often be so oppressive. “How is she today—giving you a hard time?”
    “If she’s not careful, I’m going to toss her out on the street,” Joan said, walking with him toward the ground-floor nursing unit. She moved away as a light came on outside a room on the opposite end of the hall. “Your mother’s in the TV room,” she called over her shoulder. “Why don’t you go on and see her now so we can get some peace. Meet me in the supply closet at the usual time, and don’t keep me waitin’.”
    Remy laughed as he turned, amused, but not only by Joan’s invitation.
    Your mother.
    No matter how often he heard it, the lie always struck him funny. The staff at Cresthaven would never believe the truth, that Madeline Chandler was, in fact, his wife. The lie existed because of what he was, of course. He appeared human, but had never been that. And he did not age.
    He stopped in the doorway to the TV room as an old man pushing a walker struggled through. He looked up at Remy with red-rimmed eyes, confusion and turmoil